ADIperf: A Framework for Application-driven IoT Network Performance Evaluation

The Internet of Things (IoT) is the convergence of the physical and the digital worlds. It enables a large spectrum of applications such as smart building, smart tracking, smart metering, predictive maintenance, remote control, augmented reality or video surveillance. The diversity of these applications has caused a profusion of the IoT communication technologies offerings for exchanging data between IoT devices and applications. The latter technologies come with different features in terms of range, throughput, latency, scalability, energy, etc. Each technology can fit several use cases and a use case can leverage several technologies. It is complex, yet critical, for an IoT architect to evaluate the adequacy and the limits of a network technology for a targeted application and to continuously optimize its configuration as the deployment evolves. This paper introduces ADIperf, a framework to simplify and systematize the evaluation of the performance of an IoT communication technology for a given IoT use case and context. The ADIperf approach pays special attention to the energy efficiency as well as to the ability of an IoT communication technology to properly scale up with the number of end-devices, with the ultimate goal of giving guidelines and tools for IoT architects to select the technology and configure the network that fulfill their application's needs over time.